By Paul (H. Matthew Lee)
“In combating racism we do not make progress if we combat the people themselves. We have to combat the causes of racism. If a bandit comes to my house and I have a gun, I cannot shoot the shadow of the bandit; I have to shoot the bandit. Many people lose energy and effort, and make sacrifices combating shadows. We have to combat the material reality that produces the shadow.”
— Amilcar Cabral
What has often struck me about our current Anglican squalor is that most of our problems are not unique to us. Even the cult of genteel mediocrity which has infiltrated us and our “Mainline” Protestant neighbors, and indeed also vast swaths of the Roman Catholic landscape, is not a uniquely religious issue as much as it reflects mainstream Anglophone upper-middle class culture. While the overwhelming control these cultural influences have upon our Church reveals how hollow our Christian faith has become for it to be hijacked so thoroughly, it also shows that much of our problems might not have distinctive religious (dogmatic, liturgical, or pastoral) origins. Rather, the decadence we see in our churches often appears to be a religious manifestation of a broader cultural malaise.
So, while I am disturbed on a near-constant basis at the comprehensive state of crisis Anglophone Anglicanism finds itself in, I am nevertheless inclined to argue that we must identify the varying underlying economic, political, and cultural structures that corrode us to understand and address the distinctive contortions of the Anglophone Anglican consciousness.
For this purpose, I present here a simple “sociological” essay in two parts. The first half will be a brief examination of contemporary North American life, and the latter half will focus on our Anglican churches on this continent. While I will be primarily focused on sociological matters, I am writing as a layman to his church, and I will attempt to point at the pertinent theological implications of my observations occasionally.
I am someone who can be described as a “1.5 generation” immigrant, which means a life lived in the tension of being an outsider everywhere I might call home. The historical accidents that caused me to be formed in vastly different lands during my childhood, a life lived often in separation from family in foreign lands, have inculcated me against the pseudomorphosis that I have always found uncanny in second-generation expatriates. This is to say that I categorically reject the libertarian undercurrent that is presupposed by the entirety of the North American consciousness. I am persistently perplexed by the obsession with individualistic autonomy, the pervasive disdain for decorum and discipline, and the paranoid style of thought that is endemic to our continent’s psyche today. I offer this self-description to offer some context that might help the reader understand the shape of my concerns. I am not interested in imposing upon you the terms of the narcissistic cult of subjectivity and its demons of ressentiment that have gripped the continent, as if the fact that I am a “colored” person somehow imbues my words with some inherent, mythical legitimacy. I might be a Korean writing to a predominantly white audience, but what is important is not that I am Korean but that I am a baptized Christian writing to others with whom he shares the common yoke of Christ.
Neoliberalism is the ideological superstructure of late capitalism which orders the world as a universal market, and it is the prevailing ideological framework that constitutes the world we presently live in. In the neoliberal world, society is no longer seen as a polis, a civitas, or even an oikos (family in the broad sense). Rather, the neoliberal society is fundamentally a free market, and the individual in turn is conceptualized as both an atom of production, a consumer, and even a commodity. This neoliberal world has no real structure, and in fact actively works to destroy all robust forms of communal identity that assert moral and economic claims which contradict the calculus of the free market.
By destroying such collective structures our contemporary world is left with atomized but fluid individuals. These alienated individuals, bereft of any concrete heritage and history, fill in their gaping spiritual abyss by constructing their self-identities as their own personal commodities. This act of self-actualization, which in its most extreme form entails wholesale self-construction, is conducted through the free market like any other form of capitalist consumption.
The genius of late capitalism is the enshrining of consumer identity as the central marker of who and what we are as individuals, a program which is first prepared by fooling us into accepting, as self-evident, the fiction of the individual as tabula rasa. In the ideal neoliberal world identity is no longer that which describes our familial relations, language, ancestry, geography, sex, religion, trades, etc., but rather what we consume. Consumer identity, as a private atomized singularity, exercises supremacy over how we define ourselves today, and both the law and socio-political force will liberate us from whatever that prevents our pursuit of personal desires behind the veil of the private sphere, one of the few things which are still considered inviolably sacred in modern secularity.
It is by understanding the nature of the neoliberal program that we can make sense of the most distinctive and strange phenomena of contemporary Anglophone life: the dizzying mire of identity politics. If our personal identity in this world is overwhelmingly defined by what we consume, it is the inevitable (and for the neoliberal machine, desirable) outcome that vast swaths of modern individuals will invest incredible amounts of personal capital into cultural and ideological commodities. Having systematically stripped the traditional structures of human life of their social purchase and cultural legitimacy, neoliberalism entraps us by having the commodities we consume in fact consume us entirely.
But what makes our present situation distinctive is that the issue is no longer simply the problem of a materialistic culture, and we are now in an age gripped by a pervasive material pessimism due to economic and environmental catastrophe. In such an age, the most important products we consume, which define our identity, are not material objects but ideas. Political affiliations, ethical positions, religiosity, and even knowledge are now commodities we consume on the free market of ideas, stripped of systematic coherence. The effects of this neoliberal superstructure can be seen in nearly every aspect of our present life, especially in the idols it presents to us. The prevailing idols of our time are far more subtle and sophisticated than the superstitious personifications of natural forces that we saw in the ancient pagan pantheons, as the psychological immateriality of our new ideological pantheon are as fluid, changeable, transient, and promiscuous as the flow of money through the international market of late capitalism. And in the individualism that is taken as self-evident in the neoliberal age, there are no gods but our own egos.
I want to suggest that the contemporary politics of identity raging through North America was able to find such quick and overwhelming success over the past decade because our lives have been systematically dismantled for generations. We North Americans now live in a helplessly balkanized world where any conception of a unified society has long been surrendered in the pursuit of insular, aestheticized subcultures. The way modern alienation drives our obsession with self-construction is, of course, not unique to Anglophone North America. But what I find distinctive about our situation is how our mainstream cultural norm — white secularity — is a helplessly artificial construction, and one which I find to be distinctively North American. All identities are abstract constructions to some degree, but white secularity is distinctive in the gleeful way it deconstructs its own cultural heritages and processes them into commodities.
For all the talk about white privilege and the complex ways we “non-whites” have been pressured and forced to conform to white social norms, it is seldom noted how alienated the average white North American is from any objective historical heritage. Racialization is not a one-way road — the construction of “colored” identities always also entails the dialectical construction of that which is otherwise than “colored,” the “white race.” Now that they have all been so neatly incorporated into the ambiguities of “whiteness,” even the descendants of the Mediterranean and Eastern European émigré are increasingly unable to speak the language of their ancestors and, at best, passingly know and receive the heritage of their grandparents. The price of émigré assimilation into white secularity is the slow but inexorable decomposition of one’s heritage and the rooted sense of identity that comes from being grounded by received customs and the memories of one’s forebears.
The very scary rise of white identitarianism in recent years should not surprise us as it is, in part, a desperate attempt to cling to some connection to an ancestral past. But like all reactionary romanticism, white nationalists are plagued with ahistoricity and false traditions, and their aesthetic is as pitiful as their valorization of the brutish European pagans or the world-historical evils of Christian Europe is horrifying.
Stripped of spiritual continuity with venerable antiquity and marooned in the wasteland of urban sprawl, the white urbanite is the neoliberal subject par excellence, a profoundly tragic and pathetic figure. When traditions decompose the concept of identity ceases to be a description of our givenness and our critical engagement with it. Instead, identity morphs into ideological programs which one subscribes to in the market of ideas. In such an environment, ideological programs become the basis for the wholesale construction of personal identity, and these idealistic constructions are then posited as “scientific” truth after-the-fact, requiring no correlation with history or empirical observation. Abstractions are now accorded the status of the hyperreal, and material reality is to be reshaped according to our fantasies. We are now, under the secular veil of sacralized private whims, demiurges of our own little worlds.
Here, we need to examine a curious phenomenon. Polling data consistently show non-whites to be more opposed to identity politics and “political correctness” than whites, and white progressives, who are wealthier and more educated than the national averages, make up the lion’s share of “woke” progressives. Non-whites who dabble in identity politics tend to be either Black Americans (not Africans) or highly educated second and third generation immigrants, which is to say that the North American culture war primarily appears to be divided along class lines. The fact that support for “political correctness” is determined more by one’s educational status than any other factor needs to alert us to the significant fact that progressive identity politics is the ideology of the educated professional class and their imitators. It is popular among those who are most assimilated into the urban landscape of modern secularity, whose personal identity is formed and defined by its cultural decomposition. Identity politics, both in its progressive and reactionary forms, is a symptom of the commodification of all life and the ruthless dismantling of cultural form and moral content.
The resentful quasi-Manichaean dichotomization of “whites” and “people of color” (a truly, truly grotesque colonial concept) and the manically shifting constellation of sexual identities that contrasts itself against “cisheteronormativity” not only obscures the artificiality of all these identity constructions but also distracts us from recognizing how we all collectively suffer the same rootless, atomized alienation of late modernity, crushed by spiritual and economic anxiety. One cannot, for example, even begin to understand the resentful nostalgia of the American “Flyover States” without taking account of how their communities have been ground down by the overwhelming forces of economic decline, drug addiction, and high rates of suicide. These are the social conditions that allow our collective consciousness to be swallowed up by acrimonious and divisive identitarian movements that chop up the world into tribalistic ghettos and process everything according to reductive racial and sexual concepts. Now, buried under the perpetual histrionics of both reactionary and progressive victim complexes, we all race to our respective tribal corners with little interest in empirical facts, concrete economic policies, historical precedence, or the most basic elements of mutual civic obligation and neighborly charity.
It is important for us here to move past the fashionable demonization of “whites” and the self-laceration of the white liberals. On one hand, such demonization is a transparent attempt at scapegoating based on largely immutable characteristics, and curiously perpetuates the endless narcissism of white self-aggrandization. On the other hand, the destabilization of the continent’s white majority makes North America an increasingly dangerous place for all of us, regardless of our backgrounds. The grim cost of my white liberal colleagues’ failure to understand how the reductive and moralistic castigation of their conservative counterparts destabilizes our societies will not be borne by them. The ones who currently suffer and will continue to suffer the fallout of an increasingly resentful white majority are us non-whites. It often astonishes me how all these supposedly well-meaning and “enlightened” friends of mine can be so unconscious of the incredible racial and economic privilege they possess, which allows them to feel so comfortable and morally satisfied stoking partisan flames without any real thought given to long-term strategy and concrete repercussions. It is, truly, a classical class blindness.
So what does all this to do with us Anglicans? The crisis of white identity is particularly significant for us because the demographics of our churches show that Anglicanism in North America is, overwhelmingly, the church of the white elite. That is to say: the ceaseless turmoil of the Anglican churches in this continent are nearly identical to the pathologies of the white ruling class and their internal ideological struggle because they are one and the same. The question, then, is whether we Anglicans are going to honestly acknowledge this correlation, and whether my fellow minorities and I sojourning in this confused church will authentically contend with its troubles. Will we refrain from cynically tokenizing ourselves to grift white progressives trying to find moral expiation through diversity industries built in their own image? It is not only the integrity of the spiritually and morally compromised white majority who are being tested in the demented culture war raging through our continent, and it would behoove us to remember that we too will account for our opportunistic conceits in front of the mercy seat of God.
Part two of this essay will turn more directly to the ecclesiastical dimension of the problem.
Paul (H. Matthew Lee) is a doctoral candidate in religious studies at McMaster University.
This is a link to the Combahee River Collective Statement and the legitimate origin of identity politics. This article is a racist rewriting of recent US history that misattributes the origin of identity politics to neoliberalism when it is, in fact, a Marxist response to Neoliberalism. This article is an exceptionally problematic thought piece that has no grounding in the reality of US history and political discourse. It is a consistent silencing of the voices queer women of color.
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/combahee-river-collective-statement-1977/
This is a very, very strange comment, and I’m not entirely sure how to reply.
For one, I don’t think any sociologist would ever say that identity politics somehow originates from the Combahee River Collective Statement. This would be like saying that natural, empirically verifiable evolution originates from Darwin’s Origin of Species. The fact that the term might have been coined in the CRCS of 1977 does not mean that the phenomena which it describes did not exist prior to it. All the Marxists and those influenced by Marxist analysis, from Amilcar Cabral (who is quoted in the beginning of this essay) to MLK Jr. and Fred Hampton, who all died before 1977, were distinctively and explicitly denouncing the racial identitarianism which is always present in all forms of identity politics.
Furthermore, nowhere in this essay do I attribute the -origins- of identity politics to neoliberalism (since I will argue that all modern ethno-nationalist movements, which began in the 19th century, are proto-identity politics). Rather, I am trying to argue that neoliberalism exacerbates and fosters the identity politics which we see in this continent today.
Furthermore, the idea that identity politics is a Marxist response to neoliberalism is an idea that is, for the most part, resolutely rejected by contemporary Marxists. This is most clearly shown in people like Adolph Reed Jr., Cedric Johnson, and Teresa Ebert in the USA today, but Eric Hobsbawm and Slavoj Zizek have also criticized identity politics at varying points.
Finally, you seem to presume that I am somehow ignorant of the CRCS when I wrote something about identity politics, and I honestly am not really sure why and how you would possibly think that. But I will note, not for the first time either in my life, that there is something deeply curious about a white liberal man accusing a “colored” person of being racist for seemingly the mere fact of disagreeing with their “enlightened” views.
In any case, if you actually do have substantial arguments to give, I would be happy to respond to them.
Paul,
I am a fellow minority sojourning in this confused church, as it were. Any sharp critique of identity politics, which this is, impacts a variety of historically marginalized groups. Importantly one is looking at all the groups who have had to work to gain inclusion in the non-discrimination canons of TEC.
I am not sure how any attempt to explain identity politics that fails to acknowledge how this concept is embraced, and was named, by womanist authors and activist is not engaging some level of racism. It is also problematic, in my mind, to consider their understanding of themselves as marxist to be false. When you suggest here that I, as a minority sojourning in this confused church, need to abandon identity politics your request is that I walk away from not only these womanist theorist, who actively use such, but a whole variety of other authors, activist, and spaces that are working to ensure my basic safety and health in the church and society. I am not sure how to take an attack upon identity politics other than a desire to silence those individuals working to ensure that I, and other minority individuals, are offered some level of basic safety within the church and the world.
I appreciate the article!
The conclusion to this article was very good, but the body of the argument loses some force in the complexity of its style. I actually agree with a comment below that identity politics does emerge out of Marxist ideas– not that that fact makes it any better of an ideological pathology– what neoliberalism does, however, is to open the door for these ideas which are its own undoing.
I often think about the fact that, now that our history and cultural givenness has been so thoroughly decimated in 21st century America, can one return to ‘givenness’ (whether of religiosity, culture, etc.) without it being, in a sense, arbitrarily selected? The whole Anglican project was from the beginning something of this– a conscious decision to embrace only so many centuries of the Church’s development, and to leave behind what they saw as problematic. That’s the project of Reforming or renewing something– having to selectively remove certain things one identifies as harmful and risking the removal of neutral or potentially beneficial things along with it, as any surgeon must do…
What we select may be ‘given’ realities (the historic Christian Faith handed down, scripture, tradition, reason, the ‘right way’ to make pizza, or celebrate Christmas morning, and so on) but there is also some cobbling together as seems best and most fitting to us, and leaving a future generation to make further adjustments. The project for each generation is carefully discerning between good and bad, according to what we know the Lord has given us.
Thanks for this comment, Ryan.
On the question of how to restore given cultural heirlooms when they have been so thoroughly decimated is a really difficult question, and it’s a question I’ve wondered about for some years. As you put it, this is especially difficult for us Anglicans given that the Reformed constitution of the Church of England was, rather undeniably, a traumatic affair. Even if we abide to the medieval maxim that custom has the force of law, and therefore the prolonged influence and love for the Prayer Book now has become a legitimate tradition with its own force of custom, we are still left with a tension. This is especially acute with contemporary Anglo-Catholicism, I think, in that it is often pulled either either into an atavistic archaism (“English museum religion”) or an empty aestheticism. But for all the problems it suffers, the Anglo-Catholic impulse to retrieve from the things left on the Cranmer’s cutting-room floor does have a greater coherency than many Evangelical detractors seem to think.
You are right that every generation is given the arduous task of discerning and interpreting. As Kierkegaard said, the work of faith is begun anew by every generation. Perhaps the question, then, is learning to discern between what is “authentic” development and that which is a corrosion. And here is where I think St. Vincent of Lerin’s “second canon” is woefully ignored–that is, the principle of “organic development.”
Amen! Well said. Another point to keep in remembrance is that Anglicanism is not a telos in itself– its vocation is to the Church universal, I believe, as a bridging mechanism. And no wonder it is pulled in so many directions, and why we have such difficulty discerning an “Anglican Identity”. Our proper identity is The One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, the Faith handed down. Our present tragedies a result of the “not-yet” of the Kingdom. It would almost be a worse tragedy, in a sense, for Anglicanism to develop too solid of an independent identity, lest it forget that the Lord’s Church is not what it ought to be until the fragments are reunited in Truth.
A lot of this is accurate and important for TEC and ACC to hear. The style, as noted, could use an editor. That would help the persuasiveness (fewer adjectives and adverbs).
I would add, a lot of this is due to the proliferation of denominated bodies in NA. They then become like boxes of cereal ranged on a long single aisle. In this model, TEC has become the brand you describe, vis-a-vis other cereals on offer. Ironically, the tory/loyalist cast TEC sought to model itself on, and preserve via the BCP, is now largely gone in the CofE itself. Places where Anglicanism isn’t dying out in England would resemble the big-box evangelical gatherings notable in NA. The one thing both bodies do share is the threat of becoming instinct, given size of congregation, age, baptismal and marriage rates. And the CofE faces a massive physical plant problem, given its erstwhile national presence, a steeple in every village.